James Nathan - Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited

Also by James A. Nathan

Foreign Policy Making and the American Political System (with James K. Oliver)

The United States Foreign Policy and World Order (with James K. Oliver)

The Future ofUnited States Naval Power (with James K. Oliver)

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~ THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS REVISITED

edited by

James A. Nathan

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51. Martin's Press ~~ New York

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e James A. Nathan 1992 /97'). "Before 'TIle Missiles of OCtober': Did Kennedy Plan a Military Strike Against Cuba?" by James Hershberg was first published in different fonn in Diplomtltic History 14 (Spring 1990): 163-98 and is reprinted by permission. . ..~

'''The Traditional and Revisionist Interpretations Reevaluated: Why Was Cuba a Crisis?" by Richard Ned Lebow was first published in a different fonn as "Domestic Politics and the Cuban Missile Crisis: The Traditional and Revisionist Interpretations Reevaluated," in Diplomalic History 14 (Fal11990): 471-92 and is reprinted by pennission.

Chapter 3 e Banon J. Bernstein 1992

All rights reserved. For infonnation, contact Scholarly and Reference Division, St Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York. NY 10010

First published in the United States of America in 1992

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 0-312-06069-6

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Cuban missile crisis revisited I edited by James A. Nathan. p. em.

Includes index. ISBN 0-312-06069-6 1. Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962.

E841.C85 1992 973.922-dc20

I. Nathan, James A.

9147951 CIF

For Lisa, Alex, and Michael Lincoln

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface . .ix

Notes on Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

1. The Heyday of the New Strategy: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Confmnation of Coercive Diplomacy

James A. Nathan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

, \ ,~ The Cuban Missile Crisis: An Overview

Raymond L. GarthoJf . . . . . . . . . . . 41

3. Reconsidering the Missile Crisis: Dealing with the Problems of the American Jupiters in Turkey

Barton J. Bernstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

4. The View from Washington and the View from Nowhere: Cuban Missile Crisis Historiography and the Epistemology of Decision Making

Laurence Chang ., 131\ .

5. The Traditional and Revisionist Interpretations Reevaluated: Why Was Cuba a Crisis?

Richard Ned Lebow 161

6. Thirteen Months: Cuba's Perspective on the Missile Crisis Philip Brenner 187

-2

The Cuban Missile Crisis: An Overview

Raymond L. Garthoff

THE SOVIET DECISION

On a spring day in 1962, Soviet Party leader Nikita Khrushchev, vacationing at a dacha in the Crimea, was visited by Defense Minister Radion Malinovsky. As they were conversing, the marshal gestured toward the horizon to the south and remarked on the fact that medium-range nuclear missiles the United States was installing across the Black Sea in Turkey were just becoming operational. So far as we know, that is all the marshal said, and the next step was Khrushchev's reaction: Why, he mused, should the Americans have the right to put missiles on our doorstep, and we not have a comparable right? A few weeks later, while in Bulgaria, he carried the point one fateful step further: Why not station Soviet medium-range missiles in Cuba?

Khrushchev had long rankled at what he regarded as American flaunting ofits political and military superiority, and successful cultivation of a double standard. Why shouldn't the Soviet Union be able to assert the prerogatives ofa global power? One reason, ofcourse, was that the United States did have superiority in global political, economic, and military power. Moreover, while the Soviet Union had enjoyed some spectacular successes-in particular, its primacy in space with the fmt earth satellite and fmt test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in the four years or so since that time, there had been reverses. In particular, after riding an inflated world impression of Soviet missile strength during American self-flagellation over

43 42 The Cuban Missile Crisis: An Overview

a "missile gap," improved intelligence had now persuaded the American leaders--and the world-that the real missile gap, and a growing one, favored the United States.

Since Khrushchev personally had overplayed the Soviet hand on missiles, he had particular reason to want to offset the new, and to him, adverse gap. Indeed, if he wanted to carry forward his still-unsuccessful campaign on West Berlin, or even to prevent American exploitation of missile superiority in other political contests, some way had to be found to overcome the growing American superiority. Available Soviet ICBMs were not satisfacc tory; he needed several years to await the next generation. But the Soviet Union did have plenty of medium-range missiles (a category in Soviet usage that embraced both the Western categories of "medium-range" and "intermediate range" ballistic missiles, MRBMs and IRBMs). It would certainly help deal with the problem of Soviet strategic missile weakness if the Soviet Union could create ersatz ICBMs by deploying MRBMs and IRBMs near the United States, comparable to what the United States was doing in Turkey.

The second ingredient in concocting the decision to put Soviet missiles in Cuba was the interaction of Soviet and American relations with Castro's Cuba. By the spring of 1962, Cuba had become highly dependent on the Soviet Union, economically and politically. In tum, itwas a declared socialist state andCastrowas in the process ofmerging the old-lineCuban Communist party and his own 26th of July Movement, the former providing organizing ability and a structured ideology, the latter the leaders and the popular following.

Meanwhile, Cuban-American relations were precarious. The United States, frustrated by the defeat at the Bay of Pigs of the Cuban emigre invasion it had sponsored, had by no means lessened its hostility or given up its efforts to unseat Castro's regime. By the fall of 1961, the president had authorized a broad covert action program, Operation Mongoose, aimed at harassing, undermining, and optimally overthrowing the CastrO regime. This effort included repeated and continuing attempts to assassinate Castro himself. While the Cuban and Soviet leaders did not (so far as it has been possible to ascertain) then know about high-level deliberations in Washington and planning papers on Operation Mongoose, they did know in considerable detail about the CIA operations in Miami sending reconnaissance and later sabotage teams into Cuba, and they knew about at least some of the assassination attempts.

Also, the United States, by February 1962, had extended its economic sanctions to a complete embargo against trade with Cuba, and had engaged in diplomatic efforts to get other countries to curtail trade. In January 1962,

Raymond L. Garthoff

at Punta del Este, the United States had succeeded in getting the majority . necessary to suspend Cuban participation in the Organization of American States (OAS). By the spring of 1962 the United States had also persuaded fifteen Latin American states to follow its lead and break diplomatic relations with Havana. In short, the UnitedStates was conducting a concertedpolitical, economic, propaganda, and covert campaign against Cuba.

On the military side as well, the president had in October 1961 secretly instructed the Defense Department to prepare contingency plans for war with Cuba, with air attack and invasion alternatives. While secret, elements of these plans were tested in subsequent military exercises, and elements of the military forces needed to implement them were built up. Between April 9 and 24, when Khrushchev was brooding in the Crimea, a U.S. Marine air-ground task force carriedout amajor amphibious exercise, with an assault on the island ofVieques near Puerto Rico. Another exercise conducted from April 19 to May lion the southeastern coast of the United States involved more than 40,000 trOops, 79 ships, and over 300 aircraft. While the exercise was publicly announced, the fact that it was designed to test an actual Commander in Chief, Atlantic (CINQ...ANT) contingency plan against Cuba was ofcourse not disclosed. But the Cubans and Soviets assumed, correctly, that it was.

Under the circumstances, it was not surprising that Cuban and Soviet leaders feared an American attack on Cuba. There had been no decision in Washington to attack. But there were programs underway directed toward overthrowing the Cuban regime, and military contingency planning and preparation if the president decided to attack. The United States had the capabilities to attack, and its overall intentions were clearly hostile; any prudent political or military planner would have had to consider at least the threat of attack.

The Cubans sought Soviet commitments and assistance to ward off or meet an American attack. The Soviet leaders had given general, but not ironclad, public assurances of support. They were not, however, prepared to extend their own commitment so far as to take Cuba into the Warsaw Pact.

Khrushchev first raised the idea of deploying Soviet missiles in Cuba with a few close colleagues in May. Khrushchev's plan was to deploy in Cuba a small force of medium-range missiles capable of striking the United States, both to bolster the sagging Soviet side of the strategic military balance, and to serve as a deterrent to American attack on Cuba. The missiles would be shipped to Cuba and installed there rapidly in secrecy. Then, the Soviet Union would suddenly confront the United States with a fait accompli and a new, more favorable status quo. The impact of the move, and perforce

44 The Cuban Mlnile Crlala: An Overview

American acceptance of it, would bolster the Soviet stance (probably in particular in a new round of negotiation on the status of Berlin, although no concrete information is available on that point).

Anastas Mikoyan, a veteran Politburo member and close friend, expressed strong reservations on at least two points: Castro's receptivity to the idea, and the practicality of surreptitiously installing the missiles without American detection. Khrushchev readily agreed to drop the idea if Castro objected, but his sense of Castro's reaction was bener than Mikoyan's. On the question ofpracticality, it was decided to send a small expen team headed by Marshal Sergei Biryuzov, the new commander in chief of the Strategic Missile Forces, incognito (as "Engineer Petrov"), to check out the terrain and conditions and advise on the practicality of secret deployment. The military, represented by Malinovsky and Biryuzov, favored the scheme because of what it would do to help redress Soviet strategic inferiority.

Khrushchev apparently brought the full Party Presidium (as the Politburo was then known), or rather its members available in Moscow at the time, into the decision-making process only in late May when the mission was about to depart for Havana to ascenain Castro's response and evaluate feasibility.

The military had necessarily been involved, and had been supportive, but not as decisionmak:ers. Andrei Gromyko, foreign minister but not then yet a member of the Party leadership, had also been consulted privately, and was present (though remaining silent) at the few deliberative meetings. Only recently have we learned that his private advice had been to caution Khrushchev on what he believed would be the strongly adverse American reaction, but not to oppose the whole idea directly. Similarly, the new Soviet ambassador to Havana, selected because he had the best personal rapport with Fidel Castro, Aleksandr Alekseev, initially doubted Castro's readiness to agree. But he supponed anything that would strengthen Soviet-Cuban relations.

Castro readily agreed to the Soviet offer of missiles, believing that he was serving the broader interests of the socialist camp as well as enhancing Cuban security. Biryuzov, who evidently saw his task as fulfl1ling an assigned mission rather than providing input to evaluation of a proposal, reponed that they could secretly install the missile system.

Formal orders were given to the Ministry of Defense on June 10, 1962 to proceed with the deployment, even though many details remained to be decided. In early July 1962, Cuban Defense Minister Raul Castro visited Moscow, and he and Marshal Malinovsky drafted a five-year renewable agreement to cover the missile deployment. But despite the absence of any issue of disagreement, the draft agreement (always hand-carried, with oral

45Raymond L Garthoff

instructions, as were all communications between Moscow and Havana on the matter---even encrypted messages were not trusted) went back and forth twice, and was never actually signed by Khrushchev and Castro. Khrushchev evidently held back because he feared Castro, who had wanted to make it public, would leak it once it had been signed.

THE AMERICAN FOCUS: SOVIET MISSILES IN CUBA

The "Cuban missile crisis" derives its name (in the United States; in the Soviet Union, with the accent on American hostility toward Cuba, it is called "the Caribbean Crisis") from the central role played by the Soviet missiles. As President Kennedy had warned on September 4, 1962, shonly before the fIrst missiles actually arrived in Cuba, if such Soviet offensive missiles were introduced "the gravest issues would arise," and nine days later, he stressed that in that case "this country will do whatever must be done to protect its own security and that of its allies." It was, of course, too late to affect Soviet decisions long made and then reaching fInal implementation.

President Kennedy's declaration included another element, rarely recalled, to which he applied the same warning of"gravest" consequences: if, apart from missiles, the Soviet Union sent to Cuba "any organized combat force." If it had been apprehended that instead of missiles, Khrushchev had dispatched an expeditionary force of Soviet ground, air, and naval combat forces to deter an American invasion, would a crisis have emerged ofsimilar dimensions to the one that emerged over the missiles? That question, posed as an alternative to installing missiles, is historically hypothetical. But what has not been appreciated until now is that the Soviets in fact did send such a combat force in addition to the missiles.

The Ministry of Defense in Moscow on June 10 received orders not only on the dispatch of a mixed division of Strategic Missile Force troops, comprising three regiments ofR-12 (55-4) and two regiments ofR-14 (SS-5) medium-range missiles; but also a Soviet combat contingent including an integrated air defense component with a radar system, 24 surface-to-air missile battalions with 144 launchers, a regiment of42 MiG-21 interceptors; a coastal defense component comprising 8 cruise missile launchers with 32 missiles, 12 Komar missile patrol boats, and a separate squadron as well as a regiment totalling 42 IT.-28 jet light bombers for attacking any invasion force. In addition, a ground force of division size comprised four reinforced motorized rifle regiments, each with over 3,000 men, and 35 tanks. In


addition, 6 shon-range tactical rocket launchers, and 18 anny cruise missile launchers were pan of the contingent This force was seen as a "plate glass" deterrent to U.S. invasion. and reassurance to Castro as an alternative to Cuban membership in the Warsaw Pact.

While most of the weaponry was discovered by American aerial reconnaissance during the crisis, even afterward the number of Soviet military personnelwas underestimated by nearly half-22,OOO instead of42,000. The United States failed to discover that a major Soviet expeditionary contingent, under the overall command of a four-star general, General of the Army Issa Pliyev, was in Cuba in October-November 1962.

Recently, former Soviet General of the Army Anatoly Gribkov, who was responsible for planning the Soviet dispatch of forces to Cuba in 1962, has i

\: declared that 9 tactical nuclear weapons were sent for the ground force " tactical rocket launchers, and with authorization for their use delegated to

General Pliyev in case of an American land invasion. If true, this was one of the most dangerous aspects of the entire deployment, and this was not known in Washington.

The medium-range missiles capable of striking the United States. in contrast, were placed under strict control by Moscow: General Pliyev was not authorized to ftre them under any circumstances, even an American attack, without explicit authorization by Khrushchev.

II

Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin arrived at the State Department at 6:00 P.M on October 22, 1962, at the request of Secretary of State Dean Rusk. His demeanor was relaxed and cheerful; a shan time later, he was observed leaving "ashen-faced" and "visibly shaken." A few hours earlier, Foreign Minister Gromyko had departed from New York for Moscow at the end of his visit in the United States, making routine departure remarks to the press and evidently with no premonition of what the president would be saying while he was airborne. Incredibly, the Soviet leadership was caught by surprise by the American disclosure that the missiles had been discovered a week earlier and by the American "first step" action of imposing a quarantine, coupled with a demand that the missiles be removed.

Khrushchev has been reponed to have initially in anger wanted to challenge the quarantine-blockade, but whether that is correct the actual Soviet response was cautious. The blockade was not challenged, and no counter-pressures were mounted elsewhere, such as Berlin (as had been feared in Washington). Even the Soviet response to the unparalleled Amer-

RIIymond L. Garthoff

ican alenofits strategic forces and most forces worldwide was an announced. but actually hollow, Soviet and Warsaw Pact alen.

Khrushchev continued fora few days to believe that the United States might accept at least the partial Soviet missile deployment already in Cuba. ButbyOctober26, it had becomeclear that the United States was determined. Moreover, the United States had rapidly prepared a substantial air attack and land invasion force. The tactical air combat force of 579 aircraft was ready, with the plan calling for 1,190 strike sorties on the first day. More than 100,000 Army and 40,000 Marine troops were ready to strike. An airborne paratroop force as large as that used on Nonnandy in 1944 was included in the preparation for an assault on the island. American military casualties were estimated at 18,500 in ten days ofcombat

Soviet intelligence indicated on October 26 that a U.S. air attack and invasion of Cuba were expected at any time. Khrushchev then hurriedly offered a deal: An American pledge not to invade Cuba would obviate the need for Soviet missiles in Cuba and, by implication, they could be withdrawn. A truncated Soviet Presidium group (a Moscow "ExComm") had been meeting since October 23. We still know almost nothing about its deliberations, but it is clear that Khrushchev was fully in control.

Later on October 26, a new intelligence assessment in Moscow indicated that while U.S. invasion preparations continued, it was now less clear that an attack was imminent. Thus there might be some time for bargaining on tenns for a settlement.

Meanwhile, Ambassador Dobrynin reponed that Roben Kennedy had infonned him that the United States was planning to phase out its missiles in Turkey and Italy; there might be opponunity to include that in a settlement. Moreover, the Soviet Embassy in Washington had reported that in a discussion between the KGB station chief, Aleksandr Fomin, and an American television correspondent with good State Depanment contacts, John Scali, the American-after checking with Secretary Rusk-had indicated that an American assurance against attacking Cuba in exchange for withdrawal of the Soviet missiles in Cuba could provide the basis for a deal, but that time was shon.

A new message from Khrushchev to Kennedy was sent that night, October 26, proposing a reciprocal withdrawal of missiles from Cuba and Turkey, as well as the American assurances against invasion of Cuba. But on October 27, later called"Black Saturday" in Washington, an ominous chain ofevents, including the stiffened Soviet terms, intensifted concern. In Moscow, Soviet intelligence again reponed signs of American preparations for possible attack on Cuba on October 29 or 30. A very alanned message was also


received from Fidel Castro expressing-for the first time--Castro's belief that an attack was imminent (within 24 to 72 hours), and urging Khrushchev, in case of an invasion, to preemptively attack the United States. The effect of this call was to reinforce a decision by Khrushchev that Castro did not expect or want: prompt conclusion of a deal to remove the missiles in exchange for an American verbal assurance against attacking Cuba.

Other developments also contributed to moving Khrushchev, by October 28, to act on the basis he had rust outlined on October 26. One was Castro's action on October 27 in ordering Cuban antiaircraft artillery to open fire on low-flying American reconnaissance aircraft. None were shot down, but the action clearly raised the risk of hostilities. Far more dangerous was the completely unexpected action of local Soviet air defense commanders in actually shooting down a U-2 with a Soviet surface-to-air missile. Khrushchev at first assumed that Cubans had shot the plane down, but at some point learned that even his own troops were not under full control. Although the much more restrictive instructions and other constraints still seemed to rule out any unauthorized firing (or even preparation for firing) of the medium-range missiles, the situation was getting out of control.

Kennedy's proposal on the evening ofOctober 27 to exchange American assurances against invasion of Cuba for Soviet withdrawal of its missiles, coupled with a vinual ultimatum, was thus promptly accepted. Khrushchev did not risk taking the time to clarify a number of unclear issues, including what the Americans considered to be "offensive weapons." He accepted the president's terms and sent his reply openly over Radio Moscow, as well as via diplomatic communication.

11\

Many additional aspects of the unfolding of the crisis and its settlement will not be reviewed here. This brief recounting of principal developments in Soviet decision making has several features to which we should direct our attention.

First of all, until recently we (the Western world, public, academic, and official) knew scarcely any of the facts recounted above. They have become known, piecemeal and from various Soviet sources, over the last few years. Some of this new information was disclosed or conrumed at a special symposium on the crisis, convened in Moscow in January 1989 with Politburo sanction, which brought together American, Soviet, and Cuban veterans of the crisis and scholars of it, and at the two follow-up conferences at

Raymond L. Garthoff

Antigua in January 1991 and Havana in January 1992, the latter with Fidel Castro's active participation.

Second, almost none of this infonnation has been provided in official documentation. A purist awaiting access to the Soviet archives would still have nothing. While the Soviet authorities have permitteda number ofSoviet officials (even including retired intelligence operatives) to say what they know (or, more precisely, what they recall or believe that they know and recall), there has been no parallel declassification of documentation.

For example, sbonly before the Moscow conference, I asked fonner Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin whether he could get declassified some of his dispatches to Moscow during the crisis. He countered by saying he would speak on that information, as he did But his recollection was hazy and unclear on some points, and while his contribution was welcome, it was certainly no substitute for the actual records. FormerForeignMinister Andrei Gromyko, then one of the key surviving Soviet participants, at the Moscow conference, as in his recent two-volume memoir, told almost nothing ofwhat he knew. The one exception was adetailed account of his meeting ofOctober 18 with President Kennedy, on which he wanted to counter the American charge ofevasion and deception. (Gromykodied some six months later.) The Soviet ambassador to Cuba at the time of the crisis, Aleksandr Alekseev, at the Moscow conference and in published articles, has provided some useful information, but he has not had access to the archives and there are identifiable errors in his account as well as uncertainty as to some other assertions. Sergo Mikoyan, son of the Soviet leader, has published and discussed in conferences and interviews some aspects of the crisis based on his father's unpublished memoir material (as well as his own observations). Fyodor Burlatsky, as a consultant at the Central Committee and sometime speech writer for Khrushchev, had access to a key letter from Khrushchev to Castro describing origins of the idea to place missiles in Cuba. Colonel General Dimitri Volkogonov, not a participant in the crisis but in 1989 chief of the Institute of Military History, had access to the Ministry of Defense archives and disclosed some important information from materials there at the Moscow conference (and in a later interview). General of the Army Gribkov provided additional, but also some contradictory, evidence on the military deployments at the Havana conference. Finally, senior Cuban officials at the Moscow and Havana conferences also provided some useful non-documentary infonnation.

What is one to make of this new information from such sources? In some cases, the new "information" is contradictory and inconsistent. In some cases, it is clearly wrong. By the natureofthe compartmentalizationofaccess

50 51 The Cuben Missile Crisis: An Overview

to information in the Soviet system in 1962 (and today), assertions honestly made are sometimes based on incomplete or incorrect information, in addition to being fIltered through selective memory, sometimes also tainted by access to American accounts of the crisis. Yet in many cases the new data is from knowledgeable sources who were in a position to know certain facts, and in some of these cases there is persuasive confirmation from other sources. In shon, it would be foolish to reject or ignore all such information, but also not prudent to accept it all. Each assertion needs to be judged on grounds of plausibility as well as confirming or unconfmning information from other sources. Would the source have had direct access to and knowledge of the reponed information? How can its validity be tested?

Khrushchev's conversation with Malinovsky in the Qimea in April 1962 is reponed by only one source: Burlatsky read (and helped to edit and write) the draft of a letter sent by Khrushchev to Castro in January 1963 in which Khrushchev recounted this initial priming conversation. Khrushchev did not mention it in his memoir. Indeed, his published recollections say the idea ftrst occurred to him when he was in Bulgaria (May 14-20). Recently we acquired the actual January 1963 letter from the Cubans-and the reference to a conversation between Khrushchev and Malinovsky in the Qimea is not in it. Moreover, Gromyko said Khrushchev frrst raised the idea with him on the way home from Bulgaria. Yet it seems clear from several sources that the matter was discussed in late April and early May, and certain verifiable actions tend to confirm this earlier timing (e.g., the recall of Alekseev from Havana). Among those confmning the April-May meetings are Gromyko, Sergo Mikoyan, and Alekseev.

But even if we accept without reservation Burlatsky's recollection of the Khrushchev-Malinovsky conversation in April, we must reserve judgment on the accuracy of the conversation's retelling. For example, Burlatsky recalls Khrushchev as stating that Malinovsky complained about the American missiles being installed just over the horizon in Turkey, but not that Malinovsky came up with the idea of installing Soviet missiles in Cuba. It seems unlikely that Malinovsky would have made that suggestion, and there is no indication that he did. But if he did, unless he Irlade some note of it or told someone at the time (who would now be an uncertain source), we shall never know. Malinovsky favored the idea in early May meetings in Moscow, but that tells us nothing about the genesis of the idea. It was probably Khrushchev's own idea, and all sources, information, and working assumptions about Soviet decision making are consistent with that conclusion. But we will probably never know for certain.

RIIymond L. Garthoff

Until 1987, we did not even know whether Gromyko was aware of the decision to place the missiles in Cuba before the crisis broke. Now, from all accounts-Gromyko himself, Sergo Mikoyan, and Alekseev-it is clear that he directly participated in the deliberations. Yet even at the end of the Moscow conference in January 1989, we knew nothing about what, if any, advice Gromyko bad given Khrushchev. Only in later interviews and articles in 1989 did Gromyko and Alekseev disclose that Khrushchev asked Gromyko's view privately and that Khrushchev was warned that it would provoke a strong American reaction. Gromyko, then not yet a member of the Presidium (politburo), apparently said nothing in the meetings. (Alekseev confrrms that at the time Gromyko had privately told him of the warning he had given Khrushchev.)

We have the late Anastas Mikoyan's account of his early discussions of the idea alone with Khrushchev and in the early meetings, as given to his son Sergo and now published by him in this volume. We have Alekseev's comments on the one meeting he attended. ieveral senior Soviet officials have expressed strong doubt that there are any records of these meetings in the Soviet archives, and one says a search was made and none found That may well be the case, but we do not know.

Let me cite one other case. On the night of October 26-27, Fidel Castro wrote an alarmed message to Khrushchev. He wrote it, according to AIekseev, from a bunker at the Soviet Embassy in Havana, and with Alekseev's participation. We knew nothing about such a message before Alekseev described it in a memoir article published in November 1988 (except that Khrushchev had, publicly, in December 1962, referred to a Cuban warning of an imminent U.S. attack). At the Moscow conference, in informal conversations, Sergei Khrushchev said that Castro had urged the Soviet Union to frre its missiles against the United States in case of a U.S. invasion of Cuba.

When Castro's reponed remarks leaked to the Western press in Moscow, it was denied at the conference, but the fact of the letter and its warning of imminent American attack was confirmed by both Cuban and Soviet offIcials. With the release late in 1990 of the messages exchanged between Castro and Khrushchev, we now know that Castro did indeed urge that if the United States launched an invasion of Cuba, not merely an air attack, the Soviet Union should not wait for the United States to make a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, but should itself launch a preemptive strike.

To take but one last example: From the events of October 26-28, new light has been thrownon the addition ofacall for removal oftheU.S. missiles from Turkey in the second Soviet proposal for resolving the crisis (received in Washington the morning of October 27). As earlier noted, an informed

53 &2 The Cuban MIssile Crlal.: An Overview

senior Soviet participant in the crisis has told me that changing Soviet intelligence estimates on the threat of imminent American attack on Cuba imponantly affected the timing of the urgent first message of October 26, the belief hours later that there was still time for bargaining leading to the second message, and the decision on October 28 to settle without delay. ConflI'D1ation or modification of this report from Soviet archives may someday be possible if Soviet reluctance to disclose data of that kind is surmounted.

The fact that President Kennedy, through his brother, conveyed to Dobrynin on October 27 his intention to withdraw the Jupiter missiles from Turkey was not publicly known at the time, and indeed was not then known to most members of the ExComm. It has, however, been known for 20 years. In recent years it has become known from American sources (and privately confirmed by Soviet sources) that the Soviets subsequently tried unsuccessfully to get the declared American intention conveyed in writing and converted into a commitment. But only now have Soviet sources disclosed that Robert Kennedy had fust indicated this intention to Dobrynin earlier, on October 25, and that this early tipping of the American hand underlay the additional demand in the second message received on October 27. Again, there is no documentation to date, although Dobrynin's messages to Moscow would spell out at least his version of the exchanges. The available American records include no reference to meetings between Robert Kennedy and Dobrynin during that week other than on October 23 and 27, but there may have been no written record. Dobrynin states that they met "several times" during the week, almost daily. alternating between the Soviet embassy and the attorney general's office, including on October 24 and 25, as well as October 23 and 27.

There are a number of other aspects of the missile crisis on which Soviet sources have now provided fIrSt-hand or second-hand oral or published memoir accounts. One is whether Soviet nuclear missile warheads were actually in Cuba (it now appears that they were, but not arming the missiles). In only a few cases have Soviet archives been available to Soviet writers (Gromyko. Generals Volkogonov and Gribkov), and until 1990, in no case had original documentation been declassified and made available. Now. however, this is beginning to change. Opening up memoir sources and across-the-table exchanges at least marked a beginning. In 1990-1992, the Soviet and Cuban authorities have begun to release such valuable documentary SolU"CCS as the crisis exchanges between Khrushchev and Castro, and additional messages from Khrushchev to Kennedy. Most of Ambassadors Dobrynin and Alekseev's crisis messages from Washington and Havana to

Raymond L. Garthoff

Moscow are also promised soon. One hopes there will be more such documentation, and not only with respect to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

NOTE

Source documentation and further discussion is provided in the revised edition of the author's book on the crisis. See Raymond L. Garthoff. Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis, rev. cd. (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1989).

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4 -

The View from Washington and the View from Nowhere: Cuban Missile Crisis Historiography and the

Epistemology of Decision Making

Laurence Chang

In the three decades that have passed since the last Soviet freighters left Cuba in November 1962 carrying nuclear missiles back to the USSR, the Cuban missile crisis has emerged as perhaps the premier case study ofU.S. national security decision making and crisis management. Hundreds of articles, books, and essays have been written on the missile crisis to date, and the attention given to the crisis by scholars in recent years has, if anything, increased rather than abated1

For some scholars and former officials who took pan in crisis deliberations in 1962, this continued academic fascination with the Cuban missile crisis is difficult to justify. Focusing so single-minded1y on one incident may obscure the meaning or "lessons" which might be drawn from other equally important historical events. Funher, it has been suggested that the "uniqueness" of political conditions in 1962 means that the crisis, in the words of one political scientist, "offers precious little historical guidance for American statesmen today.,,2 Or, as Douglas Dillon, the secretary of the treasury under President Kennedy, bluntly asserted at a retrospective conference on the crisis in 1987, "It is a totally different world today, and as far as I can see,_ ' the Cuban missile crisis has little relevance in today's world.,,3 ....,

Those skeptical about the academic industry surrounding the Cuban missile crisis are, of course, correct in noting that changes in political

132 The View from Washington

conditions since 1962 (such as the emergence of a rough nuclear parity between the United States and the USSR in the 1970s or, more fundamentally, the end of the Cold War) do make the missile crisis unique in many ways. And academics and political leaders who fail to appreciate these changes run the risk of drawing incorrect or anachronistic lessons from the crisis. One recent disclosure about the Reagan administration illustrates how the crisis can still serve still as an analogy, albeit a false one, for contemporary world events. Specifically, in 1984, some Reagan administration officials considered mobilizing support for its policies against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua by publicly portraying the shipment of relatively unsophisticated Bulgarian "L39" aircraft to the Nicaraguans a threat akin to deployment of nuclear weapons to Cuba in 1962.4

But the very "uniqueness" of the missile crisis argues for its continued imponance as a historical case study. The crisis was, in fact, the most acute ~-i and dangerous confrontation in the Cold War. It was, and remains, the closest

we ever came to a nuclear exchange. Hence, if we are to understand the f, dynamics of crisis escalation in the nuclear age, then there is no better-inb deed, one might even argue no other-historical source than the Cuban ;~ missile crisis.s Perhaps most fundamentally, the missile crisis, for better or W worse, has been and is likely to remain a significant historical paradigm. To ~1

the extent the crisis continues to be used as an historical analogy, it behooves ; it scholars to create as accurate and balanced a rendering of the crisis as

possible.Ii ii For the past 30 years, scholars have tried to amend and refine the history ;t' 'f of the missile crisis primarily through the introduction of new information }.' ;,

about the course and conduct of the crisis. But what exactly have the sources of information been? To what extent have these sources provided sufficient ,~

j,i information for scholars to accurately evaluate the crisis, or, in other words, r what epistemological limitations have these historical sources imposed on ( i historians'? To what degree do the epistemological limitations of historians t'!. reflect the knowledge ofthe participants in the October 1962 drama?

HISTORICAL SOURCES OF THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS j.

When President Kennedy addressed the nation on the evening of October I) 22,1962, he revealed that the United States was instituting a naval "quaran

tine" of Cuba in response to the discovery ofSoviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. The dramatic, televised speech reflected a decision by President Kennedy to

I' take public, unilateral action prior to opening any negotiations with the F [ Soviet Union. Initiating secret discussions with Khrushchev, U.S. officials I i!i

Laurence Chang 133

feared, would allow the Soviet leader to either stall until the missiles in Cuba became operational or publicly announce the deployment himself, thereby stripping the United States of the diplomatic initiative?

Because the U.S.-Soviet confrontation was thus ini~ted in public, many of the major developments in the crisis were publicly known at the time: the discovery of the ongoing deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba by a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft on October 14; the imposition by the United States of a massive naval "quarantine" of Cuba a week later; Nikita Khrushchev's demand for a trade of missiles in Cuba and Turkey on October 27; and the eventual backdown by the Soviet Union on the following day. But information on the underlying dynamics of the confrontation-how, for example, the U.S. decision to blockade Cuba was reached or why the Soviet Union abruptly agreed to withdraw the missiles on October 28-remained hidden from public view.

In the immediate aftermath of the crisis, newspapers and magazines scrambled to reconstruct events (particularly the role individual U.S. officials played in crisis deliberations) using information released by the U.S. government during the crisis and official and off-the-record interviews with Kennedy administration intimates. Additional information was gradually made public by the U.S. government in the foUowing months, particularly through congressional hearings on the crisis and on continuing tensions between the U.S. and Cuban governments. Information about the size, composition, and timing of the Cuban military buildup and efforts to monitor the buildup by U.S. intelligence were also disclosed in an extraordinary February 1963 press conference by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and in a congressional study released three months later.8

More detailed narratives of the events of October 1962, however, appeared only years later, when inside accounts by top Kennedy administration officials and others involved in the crisis began to appear. These early accounts included an article by former State Department intelligence head Roger Hilsman in Look magazine in 1964 (as well as a similar account in his 1967 memoirs, To Move a Nation); Theodore Sorensen's memoir, Kennedy (1965); Arthur Schlesinger's A Thousand Days (1965); and Roben Kennedy's posthumously published memoir of the missile crisis, Thirteen Days (1969).9

Beginning in the 1960s, personal recollections by a variety of other U.S. officials were also collected under several ()l'a1 histOI! projects. In addition to making use of these first-hand accounts, some indepeOdent histories of the crisis written during this period, such as Elie Abel's 1966 book, The Missile Crisis or Edward Weintal and Charles Bartlett's, Facing the Brink

135

1:

134 The View from Washington ~ "{ t

,t (1967), appear to have taken advantage of classified information or docu,t mentation which had been leaked by government officials. Several still-authoritative analyses of the crisis, including Graham Allison's 1971 work, t- \ ~ i 't:;>. Essence of Decision, were drawn exclusively from these early historical l sources.

I,~ Nonetheless, other academic investigations have been greatly facilitated i' by the availability of key internal U.S. government documents which began

with the opening of tiles at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library in Boston I in the early 1970s. Although frustratingly slow and haphazard. the declassification process has led to the release of many of the contemporaneous documents read and generated by President Kennedy and his advisers during the crisis, the National Security Council Executive Committee (or "ExComm''). Currently, approximately 80 percent of all State Department records on the missile crisis have been publicly released in whole or in part, and documents from the National Security Council, Defense Department, and other agencies which played a significant role during the crisis have probably been released in comparable proportions.10

The declassified U.S. record has allowed scholars to highlight the inevitable distortions, limitations in perspective, and sheer inaccuracies in the narratives of individual memoirists. For example, the release of declassified documentation has shattered the long-standing myth_~at President Kennedy had ordered U.S. Jupiter missiles in Turkey withdrawn some time before the missile crisis. According to Robert Kennedy's memoir, President Kennedy was surprised and angered to learn during the crisis that his order to remove the obsolescent intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) had never been carried out because ofbureaucratic delays.II When Khrushchev insisted during the crisis that the United States withdraw its missiles in Turkey in

I 1" exchange for the dismantling of Soviet missiles in Cuba, Robert Kennedy

reportedly told Soviet ambassador to Washington Anatoly Dobrynin that the Jupiters could not be part of aU.s.-Soviet "deal," but that the United States nevertheless expected to execute its earlier decision to n:move the Turkish missiles. However, historian Barton Bernstein was able to establish in a 1978 article that President Kennedy had not in fact ordered the Jupiters withdrawn I prior to the onset of the crisis.11 Bernstein's fmding, which has been funda

n f.: mental to more accurate evaluations of how a settlement to the missile crisis

:~1'.i~ was achieved, was made possible only by the declassification of contempor 1 raneous U.S. records which contradicted earlier first-hand accounts.

Leurence Chang

HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE VIEW FROM WASHINGTON As political scientists James Blight and David Welch have cogently argued, policymakers and academics approached the Cuban missile crisis in fundamentally different ways. Differences in the aims ofeach group--the scholar seeking explanations of behavior, and the policymaker concerned foremost with finding an appropriate course of action--color the analyses ,of each group. Scholars seek a value-free "view from nowhere," while politicians make decisions "somewhere" under specific psychological circumstances. The perspectives of academics and decisionmakers are, therefore, necessarily different. Thus, while scholars have debated whether the United States should have explored the possibility of simply accepting the Soviet missiles in Cuba or of seeking a private, diplomati; solution to the situation, the Kennedy administration officials who bore tLe responsibility of those actions have rejected these possibilities out of hand as politically impractical.

But if scholars and decisionmakers have differences in their analytical approaches to the missile crisis, they have nonetheless been profoundly linked in their epistemological perspectives. In particular, the fact that scholars have interpreted the crisis on the basis of the documents passing through the hands of high-level officials at the time has meant that histories of the crisis have necessarily reflected in some basic way the knowledge and information on the crisis held by those officials. Even in cases when historians were critical of U.S. actions or took exception to the ExComm's assessment of the crisis, their arguments and analyses were framed and supported almost exclusively by the data on the crisis used by U.S. decisionmakers. In short, the beliefby scholars that they can begin to achieve a "view from nowhere" while studying the missile crisis (and often other contemporary international events) is illusory precisely because their sources of information have been severely limited in scope. In studying the missile crisis. the "view from nowhere" sought by historians and political scientists, in other words, has usually reflected the view from Washington in 1962.13

The problem in sharing this data base has become increasingly apparent as a result of new revelations indicating that the view from Washington in 1962 was in many respects incomplete or inaccurate. Recently, several sources of what might be called, for lack of a better term, "independent" information on the crisis-that is, information not known to U.S. decisionmakers at the time-has become available to scholars for virtually the first time. First, detailed data on U.S. military and covert operations related to Cuba has emerged. While President Kennedy and key members of his administration naturally directed and,were kept apprised ofmajor actions,

137

f-:, "11

The View from Washington 136

many of the operational details of these actions were never reported to leaders in Washington. Researchers interested in operational aspects of the crisis have sought relevant information in official military histories and in the recollections of knowledgeable military officials.

The recent and unexpected disclosure of Soviet and Caban information on the missile crisis represents a second source of historical data that has been hitherto unavailable to historians and was also unavailable to U.S. policymakers in 1962. Beginning with a 1987 retrospective conference on the crisis sponsored by Harvard University, knowledgeable Soviets officials have taken advantage of glasnost to offer the first detailed and candid accounts of Moscow's perspectives on the crisis. Prior to the testimony of these officials, the only sources for insight intO Soviet actions and intentions during the crisis were the authenticated but often factually inaccurate memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev or less-than-frank accounts written by Soviet officials and commentators. 14

Several other knowledgeable Soviets, joined by former Kennedy administration officials and, for the frrst time, Cuban officials, took part in a second retrospective conference held in Moscow in 1989.1S Although varying in their knowledge and in their reticence, these officials, in the conferences and in subsequent interviews and articles, have provided insight into Soviet (and Cuban) decision making to a degree virtually unparalleled in the historiography of the Cold War.16 A third Soviet-American-Cuban conference took place in Havana in 1992 and was attended by Fidel Castro. The Cuban leader's willingness to open the historical record on the crisis was evidenced by his recent release of several key documents, including correspondence between Khrushchev and himself during and after the October crisis.

These forms of "independent" information have begun to liberate historians from the "view from Washington." As a result, the full extent and effect ~i

t',- of their earlier epistemological limitations-and those of U.S. ~i

decisionmakers in 1962-has become evident for the flfSt time. These i,'l deficiencies in information and their effects on the U.S. decision-making -,

process can be observed in several discrete areas: in interpretations ofSoviet " I, intentions, interpretations of Soviet actions, U.S. perceptions of its own :J

actions, U.S. intelligence information, and in the uniformity of information among U.S. decisionmakers.

Laurence Chang

I. INTERPRETING SOVIET INTENTIONS: SOVIET MOTIVATIONS AND THE ORIGINS OF THE MISSILE CRISIS

On ()(;to~rJ9., 19~2, President Kennedy received word that a high-altitude U-2 reconnaissance mission had obtained hard evidence of Soviet mediumrange ballistic missiles (MRBMs) in Cuba. Despite earlier intelligence indications pointing to such a possibility, the news came as a shock to President Kennedy and most U.S. leadersP The surprise with which the discovery was received is indicative of the near-certainty in the U.S. intelligence community and among high-ranking Kennedy administration officials that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev would never attempt such a risky and potentially dangerous move. U.S. officials simply had no information regan!ingdecision making in the Kremlin that would have led them to anticipate such a gamble on Khrushchev's part.

Lacking any hard information about the genesis of the Soviet missile deployment idea, President Kennedy and his advisers advanced several different speculative tN!t>ries about Khrushchev's motivations. The Soviet missile deployment, members of the ExComm ventured in their frrst meeting on October 16, could have been seen by Khrushchev as, alternatively: a quick and inexpensive way to increase Soviet strategic missile strength; a bargaining chip to be traded away in exchange for Western concessions regarding the status of Berlin; a diversion which would allow the Soviets to take unilateral action on Berlin; a way to end the double standard which allowed the United States to deploy IRBMs on the Soviet periphery but not vice versa; or a test ofU.S. resolve which would demonstrate U.S. irresolution and thus advance Soviet geopolitical power.18

President Kennedy tentatively explained Soviet motives by linking the issue of resolve and Soviet prestige to the long-festering issue of Berlin. The President told White House aide Arthur Schlesinger that he believed the move offered the Soviet Union several political advantages in its global struggle with the United States: It would deal the United States a blow to its international prestige and simultaneously strengthen the Soviet position in the Communist world and provide leverage for an eventual confrontation with the West over the status of Berlin.19 State Department analysts also focused on the German question, notifying U.S. ambassadors abroad that they suspected the Soviet action to have been intended to bolster the Soviet position for a "showdown on Berlin."2O All these explanations stressed the aggressive nature of Khrushchev's action. U.S. officials believed, as Schlesinger later wrote, that the Soviet decision "obviously represented the supreme probe of American intentions.,,21

138 138 The View from Washington

One possible Soviet motivation which appears not to have been given ,

much consideration by U.S. policymakers was that the deployment had been J designed to prevent a U.S. attack on Cuba. Although historian Thomas ! Paterson has correctly pointed out that U.S. officials believed that Soviet !i shipments of conventional anns in 1962 stemmed from Cuban anxiety over l~ f;~ a possible U.S. invasion,22 this does not necessarily mean-that the Kennedy y,

administration saw the deployment of nuclear missiles as simply a continuation of the conventional military buildup and thus also the result of invasion

v fears. Indeed. the crisis's raison d'etre, in the view ofPresident Kennedy and the ExComm, was the qualitative difference that Soviet SS-4 and SS-5 ~j nuclear missiles represented relative to the conventional arms which had f~

f;' been sent in earlier. In the October 16 ExComm meeting, the defense of Cuba theme was '~! notably absent among the possible Soviet motivations discussed. At oneH j~ point in that meeting, McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's adviser on national

x; " security affairs, read the September 12Tass statement noting that the military ti equipment in Cuba was "designed exclusively for defense" and remarked, ,i,.,.

"Now there, it's very hard to reconcile that with what has happened.,,23 Some ~ months after the crisis, Nikita Khrushchev himself commented on his motivations in trying to establish missile bases in Cuba. Speaking before the r~ Supreme Soviet on December 12, 1962, Khrushchev cast the move as an h attempt to protect Cuba from U.S. aggression, stating, "Our purpose was

" " " only the defense of Cuba.,,24 Khrushchev repeated his claim in his oral ~ memoirs smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in the West in the 'r:~\: mid-1970s. However, in his memoirs, Khrushchev also admitted that addi

tional Soviet concerns were involved in his decision. The installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, he asserted, "would have equalized wtat

id the West Ijkes to call the 'balance of power,' " and they would have given " i: the United States, which had already established IRBM bases along ,the f Soviet periphery. "a little of their own medicine.,,25 ' (I b~: As panofthe settlement to the missile crisis, the United States had offered t~

'~ 'I" assurances (albeit conditional ones)26 that it would not invade Cuba if the '1 Soviet missiles were dismantled. But until recently, Western scholars had I',

'j,ii been quick to discredit statements that Cuban defense was a real basis for

moving Soviet rockets to that island, arguing that such an explanation was both improbable and self-serving. Khrushchev's insistence that the defense of Cuba was his primary motivation was widely seen as merely a belated attempt, after the fact, to put the best face on a Soviet foreign policy fiasco. Indeed, to accept Khrushchev's explanation at face value was tantamount,

Laurence Chang

in Soviet specialist Arnold Horelick's words, to mistaking "salvage of a shipwreck for brilliant navigation.'027

The defense ofCuba hypothesis, moreover, did not make sense as the sole explanation for the Soviet action. If Khrushchev really wanted to deter an invasion, some analysts have asked, why didn't he simply offer Cuba a contingent of Soviet trQOps to serve as a "tripwire" deterrent? If he believed nuclear forces to have been necessary to defend Cuba, why did he try to install SS-4 MRBMs and SS-5 IRBMs rather than less expensive and more easily deployed short-range tactical missiles?

Having dismissed Khrushchev's comments, however, historians have been left with little other direct evidence to shed light on the question ofwhat Soviet and Cuban leaders sought to achieve in establishing missile bases in Cuba In panicular, the declassified U.S. record, a wealth of information to scholars in analyzing other aspects of the missile crisis, has provided little information on this issue, simply because U.S. decisionmakers themselves had little or no direct information about decision making in the Kremlin.

In looking at the origins of the missile crisis, then, scholars have labored under the same severe epistemological limitations as U.S. officials and have consequently adopted a similar approach. While perhaps more willing to finnly stake out their beliefs with regard to Soviet motivations than U.S. policymakers,28 scholars have nonetheless viewed the different possible motivations as only tentative "hypotheses.,,29 The inability of analysts to establish Soviet motivations with any certainty has prevented them from evaluating the effect U.s. policies had in giving rise to these motivations.

In the last few years, Soviet and Cuban officials have begun replacing much of the speculation surrounding Khrushchev's motivations with hard infonnation. The idea of stationing Soviet missiles in Cuba reportedly fIrst arose in an April 1962 conversation between Khrushchev and Soviet Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky in the Crimea.30 During their conversation, Malinovsky had pointed to the Black Sea and noted that the United States had installed IRBMs across the water in Turkey. Khrushchev was struck with the idea that if the United States could deploy missiles at the periphery of the Soviet Union, then the Soviets should be able to deploy similar weapons in Cuba, at the periphery of the United States.

In the following months, Khrushchev advanced his notion, initially with Farst Deputy Prime Minister Anastas Mikoyan, then with a group of close advisers, including Malinovsky; Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko; Commander of the Strategic Rocket Forces Sergei Biryuzov; and Central Committee Secretary Frol Kozlov; and finally with the entire Soviet Presidium. In these discussions, Soviet sources have asserted, the idea gained

141 140 The View from Washington .r I;

momentum as a solution to three Soviet foreign policy problems. First, as i' Khrushchev had indicated to Malinovsky, Soviet medium-range missiles in f Cuba would counterbalance U.S. missiles in Turkey, ending what the Soviets J tr perceived as an intolerable double standard. Second, the deployment of I:, .~ missiles in Cuba was seen (particularly by the Soviet military) as a quick and

effective means of redressing an egregious imbalance in nuclear forces ,Ii favoring the United States. Third, the move would prevent what was other11;f' wise seen as an inevitable invasion of Cuba by the United StateS.3l 1: The Soviet missile initiative, rather than a bold initiative aimed at testing "':i;; U.S. resolve, can now be seen, at least in part, as a Soviet reaction to what r:

was perceived as provocative U.S. policies. With regard to the Soviet desire t~ to counter U.S. IRBMs in Turkey, for example, even U.S. policymakers at ijtr the time of the Jupiter deployment decision recognized that the action could :t cause alarm and resentment in the Kremlin. In a meeting at the White House i~

on June 16, 1959, President Dwight Eisenhower expressed discomfort with ~ plans for the deployment of Jupiters overseas, arguing that "if Mexico or.~ Cuba had been penetrated by the Communists, and then began getting arms ,~ and missiles from them ... it would be imperative for us to take positive action, even offensive military action.,,32II

t I

The accelerating nuclear imbalance was an even more pressing Soviet I': concern in 1962. Soviet officials recently revealed that only about 20 Soviet rl> ICBMs were operational in 1962. In contrast, the United States at the peak

of the missile crisis had over 170 ICBMs and held a lopsided advantage in other strategic systems. such as manned bombers and submarine-launched 33 .~ ballistic missiles. The U.S. advantage in nuclear weapons was largely dictated by erroneous intelligence estimates which, from 1957 until mid1961, warned that the United States would be at the short end of a "missile t

1 gap" with the Soviet Union.34 But well before the crisis materialized, the missile gap was known to favor the United States, not the Soviets.

The U.S. strategic advantage was underscored by several deliberate ~~ actions on the part of the Kennedy administration and had the effect of~ I' ..) heightening Soviet strategic nuclear sensitivities. First, U.S. nuclear strategy

under President Kennedy moved toward a "counterforce" policy, whereby b t:l enemy military installations rather than cities would be targeted The possiifJ bility that the Soviet Union's fragile nuclear forces would be the primary if:

target of the U.S. missiles must have raised Soviet fears of a possible U.S. ,~t\ fIrst strike. These concerns may have been exacerbated by President f

.' Kennedy's remark in a March 1962 interview that "Khrushchev must not be certain that, where its vital interests are threatened, the United States will never strike fIrst. ,,35 Furthermore, U.S. policymakers were not hesitant to use

:~.-<

Laurence Chang

their nuclear superiority as a coercive political tool. U.S. officials, in the midst of the 1961 confrontation over Berlin. chose to underscore Soviet nuclear weakness in private meetings and in a dramatic public speech on October 21 by Deputy Secretary ofDefense Roswell Gilpatric.36 Lastly, even after a critical intelligence breakthrough in September 1961 revealed the extent of the United States' existing nuclear superiority,37 the Kennedy administration called for the production of prodigious quantities of all forms of nuclear armaments, including the establishment of a force of 200 Minuteman I ICBMs in 1963.38

The controversial assertion that the defense of Cuba was one component of the Soviet decision has been advanced by several other Soviets, including Andrei Gromyko; former Soviet ambassador to Cuba Aleksandr Alekseev; Nikita Khrushchev's son, Sergei; and Sergo Mikoyan, the son of and aide to Anastas Mikoyan.39 According to some of these sources, Khrushchev had been informed by Malinovsky that Cuba could withstand a full-scale U.S. invasion for only three to four days before being overwhelmed. In view of the apparent hopelessness of a conventional defense, and convinced that a U.S. attack was imminent. Khrushchev concluded that "there was no other path" to defending Cuba other than the installation of nuclear missiles.40

In light of these disclosures, most analyses of Soviet motivations appear to have been wrong in rejecting or downplaying the defense of Cuba theme. Many of the original objections to this motivation appear increasingly

.tenuous. An examination of the written record, for example, shows that the defense of Cuba explanation, as commonly asserted, was not offered as posterisis rationalization. As early as October 23-before it became clear that a Cuban non-invasion assurance would become part of the crisis settlement-Khrushchev insisted that "the armaments in Cuba, regardless of the classification to which they belong, are intended solely for defensive purposes in order to secure [the] Cuban Republic from the attack of an aggressor,'04l The traditional argument that Khmshchev would have deployed tactical nuclear weapons instead of MRBMs and IRBMs if he wished to defend Cuba also seems somewhat hollow in light of the recent revelation that nuclear armed tactical weapons were in Cuba and recent Soviet assernons that both the defense of Cuba and the need to redress the strategic imbalance were motivating factors.42

The Soviet information has also opened new analytical perspectives into the origins of the crisis. By establishing Khrushchev's motivations with reasonable certainty, the new information has allowed scholars to shift their focus to secondary issues. Where did these motivations come from and to what extent did U.S. policies give impetus to the Soviet decision743

143

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The realization that the defense of Cuba was a contributing factor to the Soviet missile decision has focused attention on the possible role that the United States' aggressive policy toward Cuba may have had in instigating the missile crisis. In April 1961, 1,400 U.S.-trained anti-Castro emigres attempting to stonn a Cuban beachhead at the Bay of Pigs were quickly defeated by Cuban forces. Scholars have frequently suggested that Khrushchev regarded President Kennedy's unwillingness to commit U.S. forces to the foundering attack as a sign of U.S. weakness. However, it now seems likely that Khrushchev saw the Bay of Pigs episode primarily as a demonstration of the Kennedy administration's deep antagonism toward the Castro government.

U.S. policy and actions following the Bay ofPigs gave Cuban and Soviet leaders ample reason to believe that a new invasion would eventually occur, this time using U.S. military forces. Beginning in November 1961, the Kennedy administration renewed its efforts to overthrow the Castro government through a covert action program code-named "Operation Mongoose." Cuban and Soviet intelligence tracked subsequent U.S. activities directed against the Cuban government, including infiltration of the island by CIA agents; sabotage of Cuban ships and facilities; training and assistance provided to Alpha 66 and other violent anti-Castro Cuban emigre organizations; and assassination attempts against Cuban leaders.44

In light of these activities and overt actions such as the establishment of an economic embargo on Cuban goods, the successful effort of the United States to diplomatically isolate Cuba at the January 1962 meeting of the Organization of American States, and the staging of several large-scale military exercises in the Caribbean designed to test U.S. invasion plans, the conclusion reached in Havana and Moscow that U.S. troops would evelltually storm Cuban beaches appears entirely reasonable. Robert McNamara has himself stated, "If J was a Cuban and read the evidence of covert American action against their government, J would be quite ready to believe that the U.S. intended to mount an invasion.'>4S Perhaps even more relevantly, the United States may indeed have had those intentions. While claims that a f111l1 decision had been made to invade Cuba before the missile crisis began seem overstated,46 the Mongoose program did envision the use of U.S. forces as the ultimate answer to the Cuban problem. Recently declassified guidelines for Mongoose tacitly approved by President Kennedy in March 1962 noted that "final success" of the program would "require decisive U.S. military intervention.'047

Laurence Chang

The Actor-Observer Fallacy: My Actions Are Defensive-Yours Are Unprovoked

The purpose of the foregoing analysis is not to definitively examine the interaction between U.S. policies in 1961 and 1962 and Soviet motivations in deploying missiles to Cuba, but only to suggest that such a dynamic existed. Largely because of the absence ofinfonnation about Soviet decision making, both U.S. decisionmakers and, until recently, Western analysts, seem to have succumbed to the "actor-observer" fallacy, whereby the actions ofone's adversary appear to be unprovoked initiatives and one's own actions seem only defensive responses to those actions. New Soviet information suggests that while Khrushchev's gamble was indisputably a bold and irresponsible foreign policy initiative, it was at the same time a reaction to existing U.S. policies. The Soviet action thus appears to have been not so much the "supreme probe of American intentions'>4S perceived by Kennedy administration officials as an ultimately defensive measure aimed at restraining U.S. activity against Cuba and, in Raymond Garthoff's words, "prevent[ing] the United States from using its growing strategic superiority to compel Soviet concessions on various issues under contention.'049

In the end, it is not clear how the misreading of Soviet motivations by U.S. policymakers affected their subsequent handling of the Cuban crisis. By perceiving the Sovietmove as an aggressive test of U.S. resolve, the logic of taking strong action was certainly reinforced: if the United States did not stand up to the Soviet challenge in Cuba, President Kennedy and the ExComm feared an even more dangerous Soviet advance would be inevitable in the future. Nonetheless, it seems probable that other factors, such as President Kennedy's public assurances that Soviet missile bases in Cuba would not be tolerated, or the deceitful way in which the Soviet missiles were deployed, would have made the acceptance of missiles in Cuba extremely difficult

II. U.S. INFORMATION ON SOVIET ACTIONS But the question of Soviet motivations was only one of a multitude of areas in which relevant information about the missile crisis was severely limited. Moreover, while U.S. officials were quite aware of their lack of knowledge regarding Soviet motives, they did not recognize their own epistemological shortComings in other areas which had a direct bearing on their handling of the crisis. One of these areas was the ExComm's interpretation of various Soviet diplomatic and military messages and "signals" during the crisis. Leaders in Havana, Moscow, and Washington sought to communicate their


own posture and intentions through public statements, direct correspondence between Kennedy and Khrushchev, private exchanges and meetings between other U.S. and Soviet officials, messages to allied nations which were possibly intended to leak to the other side, and changes in military posture and alert status.so

I

The ExComm did not have access to any infonnation which would allow them to differentiate between deliberate actions ordered by Khrushchev and Castro and inadvertent or unauthorized actions which did not actually reflect official Soviet or Cuban posture. When attempting to interpret developments in the crisis, U.S. decisionmakers therefore generally assumed that the actions of their adversaries were the result of conscious decisions reached in Moscow and Havana. Historians following the paper trail generated by U.S. policymakers usually have not had access to any additional infonnation which would allow them to question these judgments. However, with the recent release of detailed Soviet and Cuban accounts on their roles in the missile crisis, it now appears that several key developments previously assumed to have been the result of deliberate decisions by Soviet leaders were in fact the result of unauthorized actions by subordinate officials.

One means of communication employed during the missile crisis was a somewhat improbable diplomatic channel opened between Aleksandr

, Fomin, the KGB head in Washington, and John Scali, a reporter for ABC fm News. Fomin had contacted Scali on October 26 and had urged him to pass ilI.'

!,~ ~ . on to his "high-level friends" in the Kennedy administration a possible

,,I fonnula for ending the missile crisis: The Soviet Union would withdraw its ".,1".1.

missile bases under United Nations inspection in exchange for a U.S. tl . guarantee not to invade Cuba. When President Kennedy received a long,

emotional letter from Khrushchev later that same day, the ExComm noted that the missive seemed in a vague manner to make the same proposal, but without mentioning the issue of UN inspection. The ExComm decided that the Fomin message and the Khrushchev letter complemented each other and could be interpreted as a single, coherent offer on the part of the Soviet Union.sl

In fact, the two proposals were not coordinated with each other. Soviet officials have now disclosed that Fomin, in making the offer to Scali, had acted strictly on his own initiative. While Fomin had been given approval

\ by the Soviet embassy in Washington to feel out the American position, his ~.i L specific proposal was authorized by neither the Soviet embassy nor the I: Kremlin. Without Fomin's unauthorized comments, it seems unlikely that Ii, the ExComm would have treated Khrushchev's October 26 letter as a serious '.,)(

negotiating position. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara remarked in a r' I~! "

145Laurence Chang

meeting the following day that "when I read [Khrushchev's October 26 letter] ... I thought, My God, I'd never ... base a transaction on that contract. Hell, that's no offer .. ."S2

An even more startling revision regarding the ExComm's interpretation of Soviet actions in the crisis involves the downing of an American U-2 aircraft over Cuba on October 27. On the morning of October 27, the ExComm received word of a new, public letter from Khrushchev demanding that the United States remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey as part of an agreement to get the Soviet missiles out ofCuba On top of the new hard-line negotiating position adopted by Khrushchev, the ExComm received another piece of bad news: an American U-2 aircraft on a morning reconnaissance mission over Cuba had been shot down and destroyed by a Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile (SAM) battery near Banes, Cuba Although some historians have argued that U.S. officials did not hold Khrushchev personally responsible for the U-2 shoot-down,s3 the ExComm meeting transcript indicates that in the absence ofdirect infonnation suggesting otherwise, most members of the ExComm assumed that the attack had been authorized by political leaders in the Kremlin. At one point in their discussions, for example, State Department Undersecretary U. Alexis Johnson noted: "You could have an undiSCiplined . . . Cuban anti-aircraft fire, but to have a SAM-site and a Russian crew fIre is no accident."S.

The ExComm perceived the U-2 downing as a part of an attempt on the part of the Soviet Union to up the ante in the crisis. Llewellyn Thompson, the ExComm's Soviet specialist, appeared to express concern over both the new letter from Khrushchev and the U-2 incident, remarking that the Soviets had "done two things. They've put up the price, and they've escalated ... the action." Moments later, Vice-President Lyndon Johnson appears to argue that the U-2 shoot-down was the primary escalatory action: "You just ask yourself what made the greatest impression on you today, whether it was his [Khrushchev's] letter last night or whether it was his letter this morning. Or whether it was his [words unclear] U-2 ... 1" After Thompson replies, "The U-2," Johnson remarks, ''That's exactly right." President Kennedy himself, upon hearing that the U-2 was downed by a Soviet SAM, grimly noted, "This is much of an escalation by them. isn't it?"sS

Soviet and Cuban sources have now revealed that the attack on the U-2 was ordered by local Soviet air defense commanders without direct authori

zation from Moscow (or even from the overall Soviet military commander in Cuba, General Issa Pliyev).S6 While the action did not technically violate Soviet standing orders (since Khrushchev had apparently never given ex

plicit orders not to open fire), the attack was not ordered by the Kremlin, as

Jii;iiiiiii

147 146 The View from W..hlngton11 most members of the ExComm and most scholars have believed. The! ~ ExComm's misinterpretation of the U-2 incident, while understandable ifI

not inevitable given the fragmentary nature of available information, wasi nonetheless dangerous. :1:

:~ By interpreting the action as a deliberate Soviet provocation, the Extt Comm read political significance into what in reality was only a Soviet

,It command and control failure. In addition, the ExComm's interpretation of the incident as a deliberate action heightened the possibility of a U.S. retaliatory strike on portions of the air defense system in Cuba or even the missile sites themselves. Robert Kennedy recorded in his memoirs that upon learning of the Soviet attack: on the U-2, "there was almost unanimous agreement that we had to attack: early the next morning with bombers and

1m, fighters and destroy the SAM sites."s7 i While transcripts of the October 27 ExComm meeting suggest that many

ExComm members were actually reluctant to call an air strike on the SAM sites, the possibility that the United States would take some form of military action in response to the shoot-down nonetheless existed since, four days earlier, the ExComm had decided that in the event a U.S. aircraft was shot down, an attack: on the responsible SAM site would be executed. President Kennedy's decision to refrain from ordering such a strike was thus a reversal of established policy and was reportedly met with strenuous objections by some military officials.sa

In each of these cases, the misperceptions of U.S. officials cannot be attributed to failures in analysis or in logic. The assumptions that Fomin had been authorized by Khrushchev to float a possible solution to the crisis or that Khrushchev had directed Soviet forces to shoot down the U-2 seem understandable as informational failings. Essentially, there was not the knowledge base. nor was there an ability to traverse the gap of empathy that might have given events an alternative interpretation in the minds of U.S. decisionmakers at the height of the crisis.

III. INFORMATION ON U.S. MILITARY ACTIONS

Another epistemological gap in the ExComm's understanding of the missile crisis lay in its information regarding the United States' own military actions. In analyzing the military aspects of the crisis, scholars have also tended to highlight episodes in the crisis in which political authority intervened to prevent potentially inflammatory or hazardous military actions. In Essence ofDecision. for instance, Graham Allison describes how President Kennedy ordered a U.S. intelligence-gathering vessel away from the Cuban coast to

Laurence Chang

avoid possible capture by Cuban forces and how Secretary of Defense McNamara and Navy Admiral George Anderson clashed over McNamara's insistence on establishing political control over quarantine interception procedures.

U.S. officials believed at the time that they were generally successful in orchestrating and controlling military activities. President Kennedy and Secretary of Defense McNamara were highly conscious of the close linkage between political and military developments in the crisis and sought to exercise extremely tight control over U.S. military actions in order to avoid the danger of having the Kremlin regard unauthorized actions as intentional "signals." A classified November 14, 1962, POSbnortem on the crisis reinforced the belief that Kennedy had managed to establish "continuous, intense, central control" over both U.S. military actions and the overall direction of the crisis.~

The focus on successful political micromanagement of military actions during the crisis seems to have been the result of scholars using memoirs and the declassified documents of political leaders as their primary historical sources. Recent research into operational aspects of the crisis, using military records and the recollections of military officials, has revealed several examples ofpotentially dangerous activities which members ofthe ExComm and other political leaders never leamed about For example, on October 22, General Thomas Powers, the head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, decided to conduct the U.S. nuclear alert process "in the clear" rather than with customary encryption.60 Power's high-profile advertising of U.S. nuclear strength was apparently noted by the Soviet military and Soviet intelligence, but never reported to the ExComm. In another case, U.S. political leaders did not know that a U.S. test intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)1ocated nearby actual alerted ICBMs was launched during the crisis, an action which could conceivably have been misconsbUed by Soviet intelligence as the launching of an armed U.S. missile.61

Military actions undertaken by covert operation teams also took: place without the knowledge of U.S. political leaders. During the missile crisis, the ExComm contemplated working with anti-Castro Cuban emigres, but ultimately rejected proposals to employ these assets. On October 28, with a crisis settlement apparently at hand, Secretary McNamara gave orders for U.S. military forces to prevent any sabotage or harassing raids by anti-Castro groups which might reignite tensions. Robert Kennedy gave similar orders to prevent any actions by CIA covert action teams working under Operation Mongoose which, unknown to the ExComm, had been infiltrated into Cuba during the crisis. Unfonunately, recalling the groups was more difficult than

148 j;. 148 t,O The View from Washington i;

l dispatching them. One of the six infiltrated teams carried out its planned ,t mission and blew up a Cuban indusnial facility on November 8, at the same

time delicate tripartite negotiations over the removal of the Soviet missiles :f and bombers in Cuba were underway. As with the other incidents cited, thei'i ExComm never knew that the action had taken place.62

I,I,

The ExComm knew some, but not alI, of the details in two other unanticipated incidents arising from U.S. military operations.

I,,: The first happened shortly before the announcement of the U.S. blockade i~ on October 22. President Kennedy ordered the Navy to give "the highest

~ priority to tracking [Soviet] submarines and to put into effect the greatest possible safety measures to protect"U.S. vessels.63 As Scott Sagan has noted, U.S. forces took these instructions as virtual carte blanche to take any and alI measures necessary to flush Soviet submarines to the surface. While the antisubmarine warfare (ASW) activities, including the use ofIow-level depth charges, were thus authorized, U.S. officials at the time did not know that one Soviet submarine was actually crippled by U.S. naval forces.64

The second incident occUJTed on October 27, when an American U-2 plane on a "routine" air sampling mission near the Arctic Circle lost its bearings and strayed over Soviet territory. Soviet MiG fighters and U.S. interceptors based in Alaska converged on the errant U-2. The U-2 was eventually able to make its way out of Soviet airspace without any shots fll"Cd. Khrushchev heatedly alluded to the incident in his October 28 letter to Kennedy: "Is it not a fact that an intruding American plane could easily be taken for a nuclear bomber, which might push us to a fateful step ... 1'765 Neither Khrushchev nor U.S. officials, however, were fully aware of how potentially hazardous the incident might have been. According to research r conducted by Scott Sagan, the U.S. fighter aircraft that escorted the wander

r

ing U-2 back to base appear to have been armed with low-yield nuclear I air-ta-air defense missiles.66 This new piece of information raises the issue r of whether nuclear armaments might, but for chance, have been detonated [-t

along the Soviet periphery at the height of the crisis. The ExComm's lack of information about U.S. military actions allowed

some of these unsettling incidents to occur. Given the complexity ofmilitary operations during the missile crisis, it was not possible for Kennedy and McNamara to have had full knowledge about alI ongoing U.S. military actions. The ability of the national civilian command to prevent inadvertent and possibly provocative accidents was COITespondingly limited by the sheer complexity and extensiveness of deployments and operations. Thus, in response to the question of why during the crisis he did not cancel "routine" U-2 air sampling missions like the one just mentioned, Roben McNamara

uurence Chang

recently replied that "we just didn't know [thc U-2] was up there collecting samples.67 Similarly, in the case of the Mongoose sabotage effon, the ExComm simply did not learn about the inftltration of assets into Cuba until it was too late to recalI the teams.

IV. FAILURES IN U.S.INTELUGENCE Fundamental information about Soviet and Cuban military capabilities, diplomatic maneuvers, and other developments in the crisis was furnished to President Kennedy and thc ExComm by the U.S. intelligence community. Some intelligence concerns, such as the question of whether warlleads for Soviet MRBMs were present in Cuba, were recognized at the time as being unanswerable from the standpointofU.S. intelligence. The ExComm simply believed it prudent to "assume" that warheads were in fact on the island.68 But other intelligcnce estimates were not openly questioned and yet fonned the basis for U.S. decision making. For example, U.S. intelligence estimated during the crisis that somc 8,000 to 10,000 Soviet troops were present in Cuba.69 U.S. military planners using these figures calculated that U.S. forces could successfully overwhelm these forces and seize the island, but at the cost of an estimated 18,500 U.S. casualties.70

Scholars have tended to treat these figures as empirical fact rather than possibly inaccurate estimates. In Graham Allison's study of the crisis, for example. he simply states that "there were some 22,000 Sovict soldiers and technicians in Cuba to assemble, operate, and defend" the Soviet missile installations. Allison does not qualify the 22,000 figure as being only an estimate, nor does he note that U.S. officials weighing the pros and cons of a U.S. invasion used a substantially lower number.71 But Cuban and Soviet sources have now revealed that some 42,000 to 44,000 Soviet troops and 270,000 Cubans were armed and prepared to defend against a U.S. invasion.72

Even more shockingly, recent Soviet evidence suggests that the belief of U.S. officials that no nuclear warlleads existed for Soviet shon-range tactical missiles was wrong. According to Anatoly Gribkov, a Soviet military officer in Cuba in 1962, some nine nuclear warheads for tactical missiles were on the island. Moreover, local Soviet commanders were astonishingly given authority to fll"C the missiles without further orders from the Kremlin in the event of a U.S. invasion. If true, a U.S. attack on Cuba might have escalated into a nuclear exchange far faster than any U.S. official could have anticipated. U.S. officials trying to weigh the costs of an invasion were clearly ill-served by the underestimate of Soviet troop strength and by the failure of

151 1IiO The View from W....lngton

If:.. U.S. intelligence to warn that Soviet tactical missiles were capable ofstarting

a nuclear war.73

V. UNIFORMITY OF INFORMATION AMONG U.S. DECISIONMAKERS: THE JUPITER DEAL AND

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE EXCOMM GROUP The centtal decision-making body for the U.S. government during the missile crisis was by all accounts an extraordinary group: Composed of individuals from both within the administration and outside government, the ExComm wrestled with various U.S. policy options without reference to each

James Nathan - Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited

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